Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Episode 146: Cinco Paus

We're back with an episode dedicated to Michael Brough's latest roguelike Cinco Paus. Please note that this is a spoiler filled episode and you're strongly encouraged to play the game for at least a couple of hours first to get the full experience of learning the game.

3 comments:

Very excited for this episode! One quick note: putting the host name (and any promo links) at the top of the post would be really helpful!

A note, my infographic is a bit out of date, we've discovered new information since I made it so there's some errors and missed connections. But it's still a good starting point and should still help with the big brushes.

Onto the thoughts of Cinco Paus...

The game is HARD which I think you hit on a bit but didn't hit head on. I think it's possibly the hardest roguelike made; clearing all the Jogos is a marathon and there's very few points where you have any real safety. Your personal scaling is pretty limited while enemies continue to scale throughout the game, and even if you ignore score you have to make aggressive plays to keep up economically to stay competitive with the enemies. All this on top of dealing with the randomized wand is quite a lot to ask! I do think in some ways this is a negative for the game; in Imbroglio you are able to iterate constantly on strategies and ideas and victory is a relatively short distance from the starting point. But in Cinco Paus you need to play consistently well for a very very long time to clear.

The randomness itself is impressive; it can really alter the difficulty of a particular jogo, but there's a lot of subtle changes in play that address that randomness and it's amazing how often there's actual notable player mistakes when a player dies rather than just being punished by randomness. Even very small things like which wand do you randomly fire first in the first zona (if you are firing up it should be the wand of your row but it should be one of a different row if you are firing another direction) can have a huge impact.

So overall I feel like it's a game that is definitely exhausting even as amazing as it is. There's a lot to consider every step of the way, failure has a high punishment potentially losing you hours of work and there's a very delicate balance between greed and safety (with early greed being safer in the long run) that will get you killed often.